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(Darbą įkėlė Svečias)

Darbas:

was the formation that dominated the battlefield until the Roman Empire adapted and modified it into the cohort. Indeed, from this point forward, Greek soldiers and formations were used by the Persians, who hired Greek mercenaries in large numbers to fight their wars in Asia. With the hoplites, Philip of Macedon controlled Greece, and his son Alexander built an empire that reached India.
The greatest change came politically and socially. Many commentators point to Salamis and Plataea as the turning point in all of European history, the point at which Europe became a culture based on Greek civilization and not a vassal of Eastern emperors. Fuller (A Military History of the Western World, vol. 1, p. 52) states that these two battles “stand like the pillars of the temple of the ages supporting the architecture of western history.” Durant (The Life of Greece, p. 242) describes the Greek victory as the most momentous “in

European history, for it made Europe possible. It won for western civilization the opportunity to develop its own … political institutions, free from the dictation of Oriental kings. It won for Greece a clear road for the first great experiment in liberty; it preserved the Greek mind for three centuries from the enervating mysticism of the East, and secured for Greek enterprise full freedom of the sea.” Thus, the basis of western political institutions, philosophies, and sciences comes from Greece; little is done today, or even conceived of, that the Greeks did not ponder upon more than two millennia past.
Had the Persians prevailed, they might well have spread their empire deep into Europe. If they had been able to maintain some sort of order in Greece itself (a tall order to be sure) and drawn on Greek soldiers to supplement the already massive and talented Persian army, little in Europe stood in their way. No European population had the organization to mass against them; even the previously successful Scythians may have failed against a reinforced Persian military. A Persian navy carrying the empire’s soldiers across the Mediterranean may even have quelled the nascent power of Rome. The world, indeed, could have been completely different but for Themistocles’s gamble at Salamis.
References:
Burn, A. R. Persia and the Greeks: The Defence of the West, c. 546–478 bc. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984 [1963]; Durant, Will. The Life of Greece. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1939; Fuller, J. F. C. A Military History of the Western World, vol. 1. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1954; Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by Aubrey de Selincourt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1954; Hignet, Charle